{"id":53167,"date":"2013-01-07T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T17:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=53167"},"modified":"2013-02-03T19:10:40","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T00:10:40","slug":"medias-misillustration-of-older-mothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/01\/07\/medias-misillustration-of-older-mothers\/","title":{"rendered":"Media’s Misillustration of Older Mothers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Family Unequal<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

As I wrote about the older-birth-mothers issue recently (first<\/a>, and\u00a0then<\/a>), I didn\u2019t comment on the photo illustrations people are using with the stories. But when an alert reader sent this one to me, from\u00a0Katie Roiphe\u2019s post in Slate<\/a>, I couldn\u2019t help it:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Something about that picture and \u201cwomen in their late 30s or 40s\u201d rubbed my correspondent the wrong way, or rather, led her to write, \u201cLate 30s or early 40s?!?\u201d<\/p>\n

Since this was from a legit website that credits its stock agency, I was able to visit Thinkstock and search for the photo. Sure enough:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s not news, so the title \u201cMiddle-aged woman holding her newborn grandson\u201d doesn\u2019t make it a less\u00a0true<\/em>\u00a0illustration of the older-mother phenomenon than one captioned \u201cDesperate aging woman clings to feminist myth that it\u2019s OK to delay childbearing.\u201d But it gives you an idea of what the Slate editor was looking for in the stock photo.<\/p>\n

I looked around a little, and found one other funny one. Another Slate essay,this one by Allison Benedikt<\/a>, was\u00a0reprinted in Canada\u2019s National Post<\/a>, and they laid it out like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I visited the Getty Images site, I discovered this picture was taken in China. Here\u2019s how it\u2019s presented:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This one, which is a picture of real people, looks like it could be a grandmother, or maybe more likely a caretaker. Regardless, it\u2019s sold as an illustration of a story about China\u2019s elderly having too few grandchildren to take care of them, which is vaguely related to the content of the story, but that\u2019s not what the Post\u2019s caption points to:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that older parents are more established and experienced but many of those experiences are, from a genetic point of view, negative, says Allison Benedikt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyway, there were others where the women looked pretty old for the story, but I couldn\u2019t find them in the catalogs, so I stopped.<\/p>\n

This is all relevant to one of my critiques of these stories, which is that they make it seem like having children at older ages has become more common than it was in the past. That\u2019s true compared with 1980, but not 1960. The difference is it\u2019s more likely to be their first child nowadays. So Benedikt is way off when she writes,<\/p>\n

Remember how there was that one kid in your high school class whose parents were\u00a0sooooo<\/em>\u00a0old that it was weird and creepy? That\u2019s all of us now. Oops.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As\u00a0I showed<\/a>, 40-year-old women are\u00a0less<\/em>\u00a0likely to have children now than they were when she was a kid. And when Roiphe writes of the \u201c50-year-old mother in the kindergarten class [who] attracts a certain amount of catty interest and disapproval,\u201d she should be aware that the disapproval — which I don\u2019t doubt exists — is not about the increased frequency of older mothers, but about how people think about them.<\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Family Unequal. As I wrote about the older-birth-mothers issue recently (first, and\u00a0then), I didn\u2019t comment on the photo illustrations people are using with the stories. But when an alert reader sent this one to me, from\u00a0Katie Roiphe\u2019s post in Slate, I couldn\u2019t help it: Something about that picture and \u201cwomen in their late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[349,23384,55,2088,778,272,129],"class_list":["post-53167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ageaging","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-gender","tag-gender-marriagefamily","tag-intersectionality","tag-marriagefamily","tag-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53167"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53690,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53167\/revisions\/53690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}